For almost 35 years, I’ve been writing about people who have had a hard time of it in school, and this writing has led me to examine our definition of intelligence and measures of academic achievement, the relation of social class and inequality to achievement, and the very purpose of education in a democratic society.

“In Brazil there is a saying: ‘A good thief is a dead thief,’ ” journalist Nicole Froio writes at The Guardian. “These words have never been more relevant in today’s Brazilian class-ridden landscape, where prejudice, violence and racism run free.”

For at least a decade, Americans have been living in the shadow of war and yet, except in pop fiction of the Tom Clancy variety (where, in the end, we always win), there’s remarkably little evidence of it.

For more than three decades, working class Americans receded as cultural heroes, replaced in the popular imagination by swashbuckling entrepreneurs, brilliant innovators, and shrewd investors who make millions at the touch of a computer key.

Affirmative action lives for now. But there was enough in Monday’s Supreme Court opinion to suspect it will be diminished further in time, which makes it an opportune moment to think again about what some people think could be a fairer and more palatable way of ensuring diversity on America’s campuses—class-based affirmative action.

A white warrior against apartheid who dedicated his life to the African National Congress is now assailing the ruling party for its failure to wrest economic power from a tiny elite and place it in the majority’s hands. His story resonates far beyond South Africa.

Avery Arlington, the main character of the novel “Elsewhere, California,” is someone you know: the awkward, only black girl in class, the girl hanging out at the 7-Eleven magazine rack wishing she was anybody but herself, and the artist whose work makes you uncomfortable.

Romney’s stories on the campaign trail have been about business successes—people who started businesses in garages and grew their companies into global giants, millionaires who began poor. Curiously absent from these narratives have been the stories of ordinary Americans caught in an economy over which they have no control. At least until now.

These may be the first elections in which class will carry more weight than race; the “right to be forgotten” threatens freedom of speech on the Internet; meanwhile, some smartphone voice recognition software is racist and sexist. These discoveries and more after the jump.

Last week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK, the columnists had an in-depth discussion about the Occupy movement and the ruling class, which Hedges said is “totally divorced from what’s happening.”

Last week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK, the columnists had an in-depth discussion about the Occupy movement and the ruling class, which Hedges said is “totally divorced from what’s happening.”

The GOP and its upper-crust patrons have been waging an undeclared but devastating war against middle-class, working-class and poor Americans for decades. Now they scream bloody murder at the notion that long-suffering victims might finally hit back.

Britain’s riots were not political, we are assured, and looting is simply un-British, but “Shock Doctrine” author Naomi Klein takes a different view: From Iraq to Argentina, when corrupt elites pass the bill to the struggling masses, civil unrest is to be expected.

It’s day four of riots and madness in the U.K., and if we want to understand what’s happening, we’d best pay attention to young journalists like Laurie Penny, who wrote Tuesday: “Angry young people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on their own communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it.”

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz was Amy Goodman’s timely guest on “Democracy Now!” on Thursday, giving his much-needed perspective on the proposed 2012 budget and his must-read Vanity Fair article, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%.”

The delusion of a classless America in which opportunity is equally distributed is the most effective deception perpetrated by the moneyed elite that controls all the key levers of power in what passes for our democracy.

On the most recent episode of Avi Lewis’ “Fault Lines,” Princeton professor Cornel West talks race, class, foreign policy, the global recession, and the current political pressure that is being put upon Barack Obama.

South Carolina’s Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer has apologized for comparing poor people to “stray animals” that are encouraged by gifts of food to breed uncontrollably. Bauer, who is running in the state’s gubernatorial election, told CNN while apologizing that he is “not against animals.”

Natural disasters may not discriminate, but some members of Haiti’s upper class managed to avoid the worst of last week’s earthquake simply by virtue of geography, as many of them live outside Port-au-Prince in the suburban enclave of nearby Petionville, which The Washington Post describes as “Beverly Hills, but with razor wire.”

The Dalai Lama ran with the theme of the day while accepting the Lantos Human Rights Prize in Washington on Tuesday, taking the opportunity to point out that “generally speaking, we are lacking” when it comes to “taking care of others’ well-being.” While he was at it, he also schooled his audience about America’s widening class divide.

It’s hard to keep up the communist rhetoric when you’ve got Gucci. Harder still with millions of farmers struggling to scratch out a living while China’s select few live the good life. Beijing is hip to the growing class tensions, however, and will start subsidizing a national pension for rural workers.

Two memoirs—Eve Pell’s “We Used to Own the Bronx” and Christopher Buckley’s “Losing Mum and Pup”—demonstrate, each in its own way, that all that glitters is not gold and that the price exacted by extreme social anxiety is very high indeed. A feast of the higher gossip and raw meat for social anthropologists.

Black and Latino communities have long suffered significantly higher unemployment rates than those of whites, but the economic collapse is taking labor inequity to new and alarming places. Jobs data shows that blacks and Latinos aren’t just more unemployed overall, but they’re losing jobs faster than their white colleagues.